Unravelling CERN
A disturbing piece of news passed me by last week. One of the founder members, Austria, has decided to pull out of CERN, the home of the much-vaunted Large Hadron Collider. The announcement was made on 8th May 2009, but I missed it at the time owing to my trip to Berlin.
Austria, a founder member of CERN, has been a member of the 20-nation body since 1959, but its justification for leaving, according to Austria’s Minister for Science Johannes Hahn, is that the CERN subscription ties up about 70% of the nation’s budget for international research. To quote him
“In the meantime there have been diverse research projects in the European Union which offer a very large number of different scientists’ perspectives..”
Austria only contributes 2.2 percent of CERN’s budget, but it will be the first country to leave the organization since Spain’s departure in 1969. Spain rejoined in 1983. According to a statement,
“CERN would be sorry to lose Austria as one of its member states and sincerely believes that it would be in Austria’s best interests to remain a member..”
The immediate consequence of this will be a (small) increase in the subscriptions payable by other member nations in order to plug the funding gap left by Austria’s departure. However, particle physicists will probably see this as a very worrying precedent that might signal to other funding bodies that they could think the previously unthinkable and follow Austria’s example.
The CERN subscription payable by the United Kingdom comes from the budget of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Although it amounts to about £82 million, this is about 16% of the STFC budget, which is a much smaller fraction than in the case of Austria. However, the consequences of one of the larger contributors like the UK pulling out of CERN would be extremely serious, because of the large increases in remaining subscriptions that would be needed to fill the gap that would be created.
All this puts even more pressure on the Large Hadron Collider to produce the goods and it also reinforces the view I expressed in one of my first ever blog posts that we may be nearing the time when nations decide that Big Science is just too expensive and too esoteric to be worth investing in…
STOP PRESS: New just in from Thomas (below) reveals that the Austrians have done a U-bahn U-turn and are not, after all, going to pull out of CERN.
For more information, see the story in Physics World.
In the Dark 
May 13, 2009 at 3:41 pm
At 70% of Austria’s international scence budget and 2% of CERN’s this decision seems fair. Not all Big Science projects are the same, so that each should be considered on its merits. I am a lot more supportive today of big budget astrophysics than big budget particle physics, which seems to be giving less intellectual return. (Disclaimer: my own field is neither of these.) Hopefully the physics community will put more effort into overcoming limitations in alternative ways to accelerate particles, such as beat wave accelerators.
Anton
May 13, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Philip,
The point of fundamental research is fundamental research, not spinoffs.
The avalanche of astrophysical data coming as a result of better detector technology in the last 20 years seems to me to have catalysed theoretical advances in that field. Can you say the same in particle physics? Are we significantly nearer to making sense of the patterns of those many many particles? Will the LHC answer many important questions that particle physicists are asking today? (The Higgs, obviously, but can that alone justify the LHC’s cost?) I’m putting my case as questions, and I welcome genuine answers.
Anton
May 13, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Well yes, Einstein supposedly said that if we knew what we were doing then it wouldn’t be research. But suppose that a rich man with an interest in pure physics (and none in spinoffs) can fund one of two experiments. Criteria for choice clearly exist, so how should you go about advocating *your* experiment?
Anton
May 13, 2009 at 9:40 pm
To reply with equal coyness… suppose the rich man is a priori equally interested in both experiments, and arranges a debate between proponents of the two. How would you advise them to prepare their cases?In other words, what criteria decide which experiments are more valuable to the research community?
Anton
May 14, 2009 at 12:15 am
I salute your ingenuity in not addressing the point I am after! You referred to “the scientific case per se”. How would you compare that between two experiments, please?
Anton
May 20, 2009 at 11:51 am
You might be interested to know that the Austrians have reversed their decision!
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/39128
It still looks like the funding system is rather silly … no, EXTREMELY silly, if there is one small pot of money for ‘membership of international research organizations’ which CERN has to be squeezed into, to the detriment of other projects.
The article says:
“…the €20m that Austria spends on CERN makes up 70% of Austria’s funding for international research.
Physicists in Austria were particularly angry as the science budget has been increased by 15% this year, while the cost of membership at CERN currently amounts to around 0.5% of the total science budget.”
Therefore the ‘funding for international research’ is about 0.7% of the total science budget. Does this make any sense to you? Why can’t the minister just increase that percentage?
May 20, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Thanks for that bit of news. I didn’t notice it yesterday and have added it to the storyline.